(The whole thing is interesting but skip to ~3:50 to see the specific use case I’m talking about)

Photosynth worked on a pretty basic premise; take a handful of wide establishing shots, then take lots of pictures from other angles and the software could then stitch them together and relate them to one another – resulting in what you see in the video above.

One thing I’ve been amazed by though, is that no one has taken this technology & run with it for Live Events. Everyone knows that familiar sparkle that any video of a live event has, as many of the spectators take photos. Today many of those pictures now end up online almost immediately.

TV as the establishing shot: Fill in with Social Media

The wide establishing shots to help give Photosynth the ‘bones’ to relate all the photos to each other would be no problem with the HD television cameras that are present at the events. Pulling pictures in in real-time could be easily handled through a dedicated hashtag (or monitoring a variety of tags).

Timeline is what makes it amazing

Where it gets even more interesting though is when you consider all of the photos would be timestamped and with good accuracy because mobile phones nowadays generally sync to their network time automatically. Add a timeline feature to Photosynth and suddenly the way you can replay or review the action changes entirely.

That great hit? That amazing moment that set of a thousand flashes? When that rock star appeared on stage? These photos can all be related to each other and suddenly you don’t just have just the TV cameras view of the action but tens, hundreds or even thousands of perspectives of that moment.

The tech is all there, I’m sure with a little tweaking it wouldn’t take much to get it going… Just throwing it out there… :)

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3. [IDEA] Mind State Messaging

Ideas are living things, they start off small but cared for, and helped to develop, they can begin to take on a life of their own but to really be transformational your idea will likely need a little TLC before you even think about executing in it. That said, where ideas really need the TLC is before you even have them.

Nature vs. Nurture

Some ideas are born great, others need some help and hate to break it to you, most ideas fall in the latter category. It’s rare to have that ‘a-ha’ moment in a spontaneous fashion. Your ideas need time to grow. Think of the idea as a seed, often the idea gets planted and as soon as we see any green poking out of the ground we’re harvesting it (Get it done!) but have you really thought everything through? How often have you seen a team run with an idea only to hit a major roadblock that wasn’t anticipated? Have you even had the best idea yet?

Growing the Idea

That first idea might seem great, but it’s definitely not your best thinking. Think of popcorn. The kernel is that first idea and many get so excited they even have an idea they just run with it – but someone, way back in history looked at that kernel and said ‘not good enough’ and then began experimenting with it. They mixed it with other ingredients, and eventually came across the magical combination of heat, oil & vigorous shaking that turned that useless kernel into popcorn.

We should put all of our ideas through the same process, we need to try to break them, distort them, shake them and find that ‘magic’ combination that unlocks the true idea that they contain. And then let them rest before moving on.

Creating an Environment for Great Ideas

Let’s step back though, way back to before you even had the idea. Ideas are spontaneous, you never know when they might hit, as a result you can’t schedule a 30 minute meeting to have that ideals as we often do in a business setting. Once in a while you get lucky- but more often we end up grabbing the first idea that passes through the room and run with it.

Ideation is an Athletic Activity
Profession athletes aren’t chosen at random from the stands like contestants on ‘The Price is Right’. They put years of work into perfecting their craft so when they hit the playing field they’re primed to make the kinds of magical plays that separate them from the rest of us. And they don’t come to the field cold either, they stretch, toss a ball around, get their heart pumping to get their body read before the game begins.

This is where we most often fail when it comes to ideation and innovation though. We walk into a room and generally the conversation goes “Here’s our problem, how are we going to fix it?”, people throw some obvious ideas out, others respond with all the reasons x, y & z won’t work, and more often than not we walk away from the meeting promising to ‘check out x, y or z’ (usually to try and confirm why they won’t work.

Just like in sports, having an great idea means putting in the effort to prepare your mind for the task ahead. Your brain fuels itself on information & intersections but you need to get it in the right state to accept those inputs.

To get yourself to that state you need to do the following:

1. Make Time
   As you’ll see, the following suggestions are not something you can just turn on, you need to plan enough time to get warmed up, get your mind focused and also cool down & digest the outputs at the end of the session. 30 minutes is nowhere near enough time – you really need two hours or more, especially if you’re out of practice.
2. Come Prepared
   Before people even set foot in the room they need to prepare themselves. This may mean reading some key articles, understanding the problem better or gathering other knowledge. All too often you get everyone in a room and it’s impossible to move forward because someone doesn’t have the knowledge they need to properly test an idea.I’m just about to do a day long session for a group at work where the preparation actually started back in November with a core group. We worked through a brief session back then to identify all the information they felt they needed to understand in order to tackle the problem properly. They’ve since met several times to share their research and knowledge in order to have everyone on a level playing field at the session.
3. Warm-up
   Every distraction floating around in your head is something that chews up a little of your mental horsepower and distracts your brain from the task at hand.  Turn the Blackberries and iPhones off. Consider doing an icebreaker activity that helps focus people’s energy to the task at hand and puts some distance between the rest of their workday & the session. A great
4. Come with a Plan
   The biggest mistake I see people make is coming to meetings unprepared. Before coming into the room you need a strategy for how you’re going to approach the problem and help the people in the room think it through. If it’s a big enough problem, consider hiring a professional facilitator to come in and help you. At the very least, pick up a copy of Gamestorming as it’s full of techniques and approaches that anyone can bring into a meeting with great effect.
5. Build Up to the Idea
   Again, ideas are spontaneous and arrive on their own time, all you can do is create an environment that encourages them and prepare you and your coworkers brains to catch them.The best way I’ve found to do this is to approach the idea from a few different angles before tackling it head on. Figure out the characteristics and inputs that will affect this idea and focus on activities that help everyone in the room think about and understand those aspects better.
6. Capture Everything & Make it Visible
   
   As the session progresses capture the thinking on paper & post-its. Create artifacts and be sure to post them around the room. You never know what might get suggested early on that could be the important other half of an idea that gets suggested later.
7. Force deeper thinking
   Every meeting has a ‘slam dunker’, the person who latches on to the first ‘good’ idea because they just want to slam the ball home as quickly as possible. Design your session so you can test the ideas. Shred them, twist them, reverse them, break them and build them back up. You need to give yourself the time to really play with the idea. When everyone starts nodding together it’s time to attack the idea from a different angle.

In Short: Give Your Idea the Time it Needs – Before, During and After

It takes time to do this right, with ideas there’s no quick fix – especially if it’s not something that people on the team are really expected to do on a daily basis. You need to nourish your brain in the days or weeks leading up to a session, giving it the information it needs to tune itself to the kinds of ideas you need. At the session you need to warm your brain back up and help it get focused on the task at hand. Finally, afterwards you need to give your brain the time to punt the idea around in your subconscious and think it through some more.

There’s a reason people say they need to sleep on something. It gives the idea room to breathe and let’s you step back and reflect on it. Does it excite you still the next day? What ‘what-ifs’ did you think of over night that you missed while you cooked up the idea? A little distance is a great thing for an idea as you nudge it out of the nest and see if it can fly.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any athletic activity, the more often you do it, the better you’ll get at it but it takes time & practice. Aside from a $20 copy of Gamestorming, every idea in this post is FREE. It just takes a little extra time to implement and do properly. And while scheduling a longer meeting (2,4, even 8 hours) may initially get push back, once people have seen how effective a little extra time can be they’ll get on board pretty quickly. The reality is, they already spend this time on a problem – just ineffectively and in fits and starts across multiple meetings.

Good luck & happy ideating!

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These two bills arguably present the first front in a battle to keep the Internet open, free and uncensored. They threaten to hand the reigns of the web to multinational corporations, entertainment companies primarily, allowing them to have sites they don’t like blocked within the US and gives them the power to sue sites just for LINKING to other sites that may host or otherwise give access to copyrighted materials. The laws are vague, over reaching and variations of it will no doubt spread to Canada in short order if passed in the United States.

Get Informed 

Michael Geist has a great article on Huffington Post about why we should care here in Canada.

Fight for the Future published this great video that explaining why Protect-IP is a dangerous bill:

You can also check out the infographic put together by AmericanCensorship.org. Wikipedia also has a good page outlining some of the challenges with these bills.

Make Your Voice Heard

Visit Sopastrike.com to see how you can make your voice heard.

If you’re outside of the US use this form to add your name to the petition:

#stopsopa

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As a result I’ve had a front seat as they’ve been dragged into a new world where they’re no longer the place where employees are amazed at the cutting-edge technologies they get to work with at the office, but instead a place where just keeping up with the latest technologies has become a massive challenge (Hands up if you work at a big corp and you’re still on Win XP, Office 2003 & IE6).

Compounding the problem is the accelerating pace of technology evolution – not just for the applications and hardware already in the organization, but the growing number of applications and devices they’re expected to support. 25-30 years ago it was a putting a computer on every desk, today I personally have a corporate desktop, laptop (2 actually), blackberry and iPad. Then you’ve got the applications, the intranet and all the servers to run everything. What it boils down to is 100′s of thousands of moving parts that they’re responsible for and that number is only increasing (oh, and did we mention your budget has been cut back?).

So with that context I do think there’s some areas where technology groups could make their lives easier. Most, if not all, of the following rules really only require a mindset shift to implement (easier said than done, I know)

The Rules

1. Processes should provide guidance & governance – not power.
   When implemented properly, processes are great – they keep things in order, help ensure standards are adhered to and generally help keep things running smoothly. Where processes go wrong is when the people responsible for managing them begin to believe that they have power because of them. At the end of the day the primary goal of any process is to ensure the real needs  of the end-user is being met in a reliable, proven way.
2. If there is a process you expect people to follow it must be clear, documented and accessible to them.
   If you’re going to force someone through a process, you better be damn sure you can tell them what it is, what you expect and how you will deliver.  It’s not a process if you kinda-sorta do it ‘this way’ most of the time.
3. ‘No’ or ‘we can’t’ are not solutions. If you want to own responsibility for an area then you also own the responsibility to provide solutions for it.
   If you can’t do it own up to it & help them find someone who can (You’ll look better for doing it) – people aren’t asking you “if” they can do something, they’re asking how. You either need to find them a solution or have a very good reason, that you can explain to them, for not being able to deliver.
4. Just become something can do it, it doesn’t mean it should.
   SharePoint anyone? Don’t get caught up in the buzzwords and basic functionality. Find out what the real needs of the user are and ensure the solutions  you present deliver on them. SharePoint is a great example of this. It does EVERYTHING, but does very few things well. If you compare SharePoint’s ‘Blogging’ capability to just about any other current solution it just doesn’t compare – yet many companies get SharePoint and then declare it the standard for anything it can supposedly do.
5. One size does not fit all
   It’s very easy to look at a device, maybe even test it out with a few users and then say “This isn’t the right device for our organization” ot “this is the standard device we’re all going to use – but the reality is one size rarely fits all.  While I appreciate standards make sense from an administration & management perspective but we also need to step back and consider the use case for a given technology, in fact that’s where we need to start. It’s fine to consider the ‘standard’ device before looking at others but at the end of the day it’s our responsibility to find a solution that truly solves the need.
6. Security must be practical, not theater
   If it’s new, you can pretty much count on security having an issue or two with it. The challenge for/with security is everything lives in the “What If …?” realm. It’s a really hard to debate the likelihood of a given scenario when it’s entirely hypothetical. Security is hugely important, but the risk it runs is of stifling the advancement of the organization in general out of fear of the unknown. Reflection of how realistic or practical the concern is, is an important step to keeping things moving. This is going to be increasingly important as more and more data & applications move to the ‘Cloud’ – something that gives Security conniptions but is an eventual evolution.
7. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.
   It’s very easy to get hidden and siloed off by a process and organizational structure. There’s forms, tracking systems and dedicated points of contact that all serve to get between the technologists and the users. What it creates is this horrible game of ‘telephone’ where messages & intentions become confused. The best thing we can do for any project is get everyone in the same room, early & often and keep the lines of communication open at all times.
8. Agility, not size or market share, is what will make this era’s businesses successful.
   It’s great to be big, until the market shifts underneath you. Agility is what is going to decide which companies remain competitive in the near future. If I were at the helm of an Enterprise IT group today I’d be pouring a tonne of effort into making my organization as nimble as possible. This is going to be come increasingly important in companies who deal directly with their end customers (ie service organizations) as your customer bases are living in a rapidly available world and don’t care why you don’t have a given service or technology, only that your competitor does.
9. Don’t be afraid to acknowledge mistakes. If the solution doesn’t work be prepared to dump it and try something else.
   Unfortunately with projects at the scale of some Enterprise IT projects it’s really, really hard to let them go. Once a technology is in place it’s rare that it’s getting dislodged regardless of how loathed it is by the users. Don’t be afraid to re-evalute tools and decide to dump them if they’re not meeting expectations. And whatever you do, don’t get locked into the mindless upgrade path – any major version release is a good time to question whether you’re still on the right tool for the job.
10. Change your mindset from Monopoly to competition.
    For many years, enterprise has had a lock on the ‘business’ of technology in their organization – it you wanted something you had to go through IT but that’s changing. So many business applications are available on the web today, and all it takes is a corporate credit card to sign up. For each project ask yourself  ’would the business have decided to use us if someone else was bidding against us’.

—
All that said, this isn’t an attack on IT or technology groups, what it hopefully serves as is another voice contributing to a call for change in how we work together.

Enterprise technology groups have a massive challenge ahead of them as they try and pivot into agile organizations that can keep up with today’s technology.

What we need is to step back and look at how we can work together better – I hope these ‘rules’ can help provide a foundation for that shift.

Did I miss any? What rules would you add to this list? Let me know i the comments below.

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It happens easily enough – A team within a department are tasked with cleaning up their processes and building and configuring a system to automate all that tedious data collection and information submission. It’s a task that is approached with the best intentions but often goes horribly astray at some point along the way. The reason? The Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) begin thinking of themselves as the ‘users’ and when that happens, all hope is lost.

Heck, if it’s a system that only the SMEs need to use then go for it, knock yourself out. Unfortunately though, more often than not, the intentions of these systems is to get users from outside a department or work group to submit information to the SMEs in a consistent, organized fashion. The problem? They’re not SME’s – they don’t know what you know. Actually, the problem in these cases is that YOU don’t know what you know.

You Don’t Know What You Know

There’s a concept known as the “Conscious Competence Learning Model” , attributed to Noel Burch of Gordon Training International. It breaks down the process of learning into four stages:

We all start off at “Unconscious Incompetence” – we do’t even know the skill exists, so we can’t know we don’t have it. As our familiarity increases we move own to “Conscious Incompetence” (we know what we don’t know) and then on to “Conscious Competence” (we know what we know) - And many people would assume that’s where it ends.

But there’s that fourth stage “Unconscious Competence” – where you get so  good at a given skill that you aren’t even really aware of it any more. You do it almost instinctively, not really aware of how, or even that you’re doing it.

Think about riding a bike – sure you can easily explain how to peddle it, but have you ever tried to explain to someone how to balance on it? Even with peddling, on your first crack you can recite the basic premise (‘push down on pedal, bake moves’) but you probably leave out all the other key bits of information. Which part of the foot do you put on the pedal? How do you move your back foot that’s on the upswing? What about that awkward moment when your back foot comes over the top and begins the down stroke?

The more you really stop and think about it, become conscious of the process, you start to see how many little bits of knowledge you hold about the process of riding your bike. Yet when you get on it, you just go – without a thought of what the actual process is.

Unconscious Competence Kills User Experience

This instinctive capability is exactly what kills user experience in these types of projects. You take a bunch of SMEs and ask them to specify and test an application for a topic or function they’re unconsciously competent and then turn around and ask the ‘incompetent’ (both conscious and unconscious) to use it.

In short: if the SMEs love the interfaces that you’ll be asking non-SMEs to use you’re probably doomed.

So What To Do?

• Know who the user is for a given interface and test with them early & often.
  It’s critical to remember that you have to design for ‘incompetence’ in these systems. Often the mindset is “They don’t know the process so what do they have to offer us?” but that’s really the exact reason you SHOULD ask them for feedback. This is not to say SMEs shouldn’t have a seat at the table in this process, certainly they are the actual users for parts of the application, you just need to be aware of who will be using the interface, and understand what level of competence.
• Shoshin: The Beginner’s Mind
  There’s a concept in Zen Buddhism called ‘Shoshin‘ or ‘Beginner’s Mind’ that refers to approaching things with the attitude of a beginner – shedding what you know or think about a topic and approaching it like a novice again. Reflect on the process or function you’re trying to address and learn to uncover what those unconsciously competent elements are by coming at it with a beginner’s mind.
• Bring in the Pros (& not necessarily the vendor)
  User experience is a specialized discipline that often gets forgotten about completely – and can be very hard to argue for budget to bring them in, especially on internal facing projects but it’s really the best thing you can do for your users. With applications from external vendors, the other trap that many companies fall into is the belief that the application vendors can guide them towards creating a great user experience but I think ultimately they’re led astray because many vendors have deep knowledge of their own systems and what you really end up with is a compounded unconscious competence effect. What you really want is that third party that specializes in designing user experiences and ideally you should brng them in BEFORE you even choose an application so you can then be sure you’re choosing the application that suits the user experience you want to create, rather than trying to shoe horn your experience into an application.

Creating a better user experience for your end users doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive – Even just being conscious of who the users are & what level of competence they’ll have will go a long ways to improving the state of many applications. If you want true success, consider making room in the budget & process for some outside help and be sure to get them involved as early as possible. 

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It’s easy to use and oddly addictive they’ve put just enough game in the app to keep you interested in proactively adding data to it but also passively leverages the folks who just drive  around with it on and don’t want to contribute additional data on their own.  I especially love the touch of them adding ‘candy’ bonus points to the map to areas where they need more data about the road – a great way to encourage the harder core members to venture down that street. You can even have the system prefer to route you over those spots – don’t think I’ll be getting THAT into it, but you know there’s some keeners out there.

As I was off this week I haven’t had a chance to give it a go during rush hour but am looking forward to trying it out in heavier traffic in the coming weeks to see how well it alerts me to and routes around bad traffic.

Their site has a pretty good guided tour – check it out below. The app is a free download for most mobile platforms.

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The default position of many organizations is to adapt the users behavior to fit the infrastructure rather than building an infrastructure to support the desired behavior. I suggested in the meeting that we needed to do a lot less of the former and really focus on the latter which of course, predictably, was responded to with “Do you have any idea what that would cost?”

Actually yes, I do.

Nothing.

The reality is, this isn’t a financial problem – it’s a mindset problem. If you approach a given problem from the angle of all the various reasons that it won’t work – you’re doomed before you even get off the ground.

Have Do Be > Do Be Have

I think a major challenge is people have a hard time separating the ideas of acting and being. To paraphrase a colleague of mine – many approach problems from the angle that if we HAVE ‘x’ we can DO ‘y’ and BE ‘z’. In their minds we can’t adopt a behavior until the tool is there to use.

The problem with this mindset is the future state never gets to the forefront and the same story plays out year after year.

In reality, we should be approaching the issue from the opposite direction. We should figure out the behaviours we want to encourage, adopt and model them as best as we can and the tools will fall in line.

Going back to the conversation I was having the other day, we were talking about ideas that ranged from tomorrow to five years out. Sure, some of the ‘tomorrow’ stuff can’t be supported right away, but to shoot down ideas on a five year horizon based on existing infrastructure and challenges means nothing is going to change (or at least not at any appreciable pace)

If you instead adopted the approach that we are going to BE ‘z’ which will mean we will DO ’y’ and ultimately HAVE ‘x’ then change will happen on its own over time.

You Become What You See

If you decide ‘this is the behavior or capability we want to encourage or support’ then suddenly the decisions you make start to change – you apply your desired behavior to everything you’re doing and make minor course corrections as you go. Like driving a car around a corner, if you’re looking right in front of the car you’ll make rough, jerky corrections. But, as soon as you take your eyes and look further around then corner your adjustments smooth out and low and behold your cars ends up exactly where you were looking.

This is exactly why businesses have Vision statements, it’s their statement about which way the employees should be rowing the boat. Your projects need that same focus point to contextualize them for everyone involved and decisions need to be made through that lens.

What needs to happen in Enterprise IT Groups

Enterprise IT groups have a horrible habit of viewing everything through their own lens and agenda and theirs alone. Instead the lenses of the two groups really need to be combined and a common vision needs to be created. I think often IT Groups get so caught up in their own dramas that they often miss opportunities to leverage or use projects that are being brought to them to further their own goals.

It’s a hard place for technology minded people, feature sets and capabilities are often a very black and white environment. It either does “x” or it doesn’t.

What we as technologists need to practice is putting ourselves in the users shoes and understanding the behavior or capabilities they require. Occasionally we may even need to probe further to help the person asking understand why they really want that specific device or feature. If you can better understand what they’re actually trying to accomplish then you can much better inform and support them in achieving it, even if the specific ‘solution’ they’re asking for isn’t something that can be supported right away.

What To Do When Approaching an IT Group

Get out of the Features discussion and come to the table with a vision that can be understood by everyone at the table.

People often approach the problem from a very specific feature problem which immediately throws the conversation into a very binary state.

You ask the technology people for feature “x” and they can easily say “No, that’s not supported” (which, at the time is probably true, after all if it existed you probably wouldn’t be asking) – but imagine if the conversation started with “We’re trying to create an environment to allow ‘y’ behaviour, how do we get there?” – now you’re into a roadmap conversation, and those are much harder to just switch off.

To do this though, you also need to be coming to the table with a clear vision of where you’re trying to get. I often see people coming to the table asking for something that can be easily dismissed as ‘the cool new thing’ (ie “I need iPads”) rather than a clear vision of what they’re trying to accomplish (ie “We want to increase productivity & connectivity of our mobile workforce”). It’s easy to say no to the former, but the latter starts you on a conversation that includes everyone in your vision and gives them a reference point to begin to offer you suggestions for how to proceed.

Money is never the problem

Will the change truly cost “nothing”? Of course not – the change in mindset is free but the reality is, in a company money is never an issue. It’s a convenient way to say No to things but I’ve already seen it time and time again in my own work – if something aligns with or advances the corporate vision, has a clear vision itself, and can demonstrate value to the organization the money will be found.

By approaching your challenge in a manner that is behavior centered, focused by a clear, shared vision and allows for dialogue you’ll likely find there are much better outcomes in your future.

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In figuring out what to do I finally realized,  for the most part, I had completely backburnered any of my creative pursuits over the past year. With the exception of our Hawaii trip in August, I probably took as many photos this year as I did in some individual months in years past. I haven’t been blogging and my photoblog has been sporadic at best.

As I pondered it further I realized that when I’m not creating, I’m just not happy and I’m not creating new opportunities or experiences for myself.

So my theme for 2012 is going to be “Create”.

Create: Opportunity

One thing I’ve noticed is since I’ve started letting my blog & other content outlets go quiet so too has my connection with the local community. Social tools like Twitter & Facebook are great for the odd passing conversation but I’ve been missing the deeper discussions that a good blog post can help kickoff. Twitter & Facebook  have also meant I’m often not developing or sharing ideas deeper than what I can cram into a Twitter status update.

The ultimate result is the loss of opportunity. Opportunity for ideating, sharing, and connecting – that has to change this year.

Create: Change

I’ve made good use of Netflix over the holidays and caught up on a variety of documentaries that I’ve been meaning to see, many of them of the “the system is broken” persuasion - the unfortunate side effect is it’s left me riled and frustrated at the whole situation. While over the years I’ve done work with some organizations  trying to bring about social change in one way or another (tcktcktck, SiG@MaRS, Community Power Fund, Windfall Ecology Centre, ChangeCamp etc.) those opportunities have been few and far between and I know I’ve missed opportunities to contribute more – so I’ll be watching for more opportunities to create change this year.

Create: Community

One area I’ve really let slide over the eighteen months or so is around helping create community both online and off. Toronto’s way overdue for another VizThink, and the BarCamp we hoped to have late last year never quite materialized. I hope to help remedy both situations this year.

I also want to start reconnecting with the start-up community in the city – My experiences in a variety of start-ups over the years is just not getting used in my current role at the bank and from time to time I get that start-up itch again. I’d love to scratch that itch more actively in an advisory or mentor capacity for some of the entrepreneurs and start-ups in the city. (know someone who’d be interested? let me know!)

Create: Accountability

Finally, I want to create some sort of accountability for this year. So friends, real, virtual or other – please call me out this year if you think I’m slacking the the “Create” department.

I hope everyone has a great 2012 – I know I’m looking forward to creating one for myself.

- Ryan

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In the latter case people often don’t realize they’re hitting the wall because it’s always been that way, or they’re so removed from the people actually doing the work they never know what is happening. It’s as if you send your car off with someone you don’t know and they return it back to you sometime later, smashed up but just barely recognizable. At that point you’re so glad to see it again that you simply take it and say “Thank You”.

For innovators in a big organization I think it’s a critical part of our job to seek out those obstacles and deliberately go crashing headfirst into them. Let me explain…

The Field and The Jungle

My biggest learning in the past few months since joining a huge organization has been just how many obstacles there are and how hard it can be to identify who’s responsible and how to resolve the issue. There are endless rabbit holes of anonymous forms, group email addresses and blackbox processes where you slip in your idea and wait to see what comes out.

Having previously worked in nothing but small organizations & start-ups (<20 people, usually 3-5) in the past I always knew who was responsible for a specific task or process and where I could go if I was having problems. If it couldn’t be solved there was always a way around the problem. I’d equate it to standing on a path through an open field with some small pebbles and rocks blocking your path – Sure you’d hit the odd big, immovable rock (i.e. “Money”) but generally getting over, around or just plain removing an obstacle always seemed possible.

Compare that to a big enterprise where it’s more like walking down a narrow, sometimes barely discernible, path in a heavy jungle that turns black with darkness a few feet off the path. Sure you encounter the odd pebble and rock but quite often you find yourself face to face with a giant boulder obstructing the way. It could probably be moved, and you know the person responsible for it is somewhere out there in the jungle, but stepping off the path is fraught with danger and you’re not even sure who you’re looking for. It’s full of risk and many people are taught “stay on the path”. As a result, many simply stand at the boulder waiting for someone or something to come along and roll it out of the way for them, resenting the process while they watch their project backup on the trail behind them.

Innovation in a Big Organization

In the team we refer to the three types of innovation work we address “New to ‘us’”, “New to the Industry”, and “New to the World” – of course everyone would rather play in that final category but the reality is very few organizations have the stomach for, or capability to play in, that realm.  Instead there’s a lot of time spent bringing new to us, or new to the industry, ideas that have traction in the ‘outside’ world into the organization.

Increasingly though, I’m seeing the role of our team evolve to become jungle guides – it’s become less about “what” we bring into the organization but more about the “how” we bring things in. There are actually plenty of innovative people in the organization, everyday we learn of initiatives or ideas that are being hatched and worked on. Too often though we hear about them because the people championing them are coming to us looking for help navigating the trail.

Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick

Our team has a huge advantage in the enterprise jungle – Our cross-functional make-up of our team (we all report to different areas of the organization) and interaction with a diverse group of people across the organization gives us a unique view of the landscape. Our complementary skills (Strategist, Business Analyst, Facilitator and a Developer) serve as a giant machete, it’s not hard for us to blaze new trails occasionally and when we get on open trails we can move quickly. Lastly, our executive support means we’ve got air support that when necessary, can be used to help get obstacles out of our way.

Put the Stick Away

Here’s the thing though – putting all those tools to use helps in the short term, but in the long run it doesn’t actually help the organization. It all comes down to whether you want innovative ‘things’ or an innovative culture. Sure we can push a new technology or application through a little quicker or find loopholes and openings to get us around the obstacles but that isn’t something the average employee has the benefit of. To really benefit the organization we need to go running headfirst into some of these obstacles. This will necessarily mean it takes longer to get to our destination but there’s no point in blazing new trails that other people can’t follow.

Crash Test Dummies

The IIHS doesn’t crash cars into things because it’s fun (though I’m sure it doesn’t hurt) – they smash them into the walls, see what happens and then learn from their findings. As innovators we need to crash a few cars. Our advantage is we’re equipped for the crash. We know we can withstand it, and largely, we’re in control of it – we can see the obstacle ahead and we can choose when, where and even how fast we’re going to crash into it.

Scout

Now I’m not advocating rushing recklessly into walls to see what happens, to be effective you need to control the experiment as much as possible – in our case we first Scout out what’s ahead on the road. We learn what’s ahead while trying to balance not over familiarizing ourselves with the process, just enough to have a pretty good hunch where something is going to break. It’s important to scout on both sides, with the drivers and the obstacle owners. Find out what’s failed for people and learn what is expected at each stage – then you can put your car on the track.

There will often be multiple obstacles, take on one at a time.

Look What Happened To My Car

We need to crash into these walls not just so we can make better cars (better prepare our projects/ideas) but also so we can go visit the owner of the obstacle and say “Look what happened to my car” and hear their version of what happened. It’s not about blame, but rather understanding. One there’s common understanding we can begin to determine if the obstacle is the right size and how we better let the drivers know where it is so they can anticipate it.

I’ve been consistently amazed when I talk to the groups on either side and find how similar their stories are. Each feels the other doesn’t understand them, has unreasonable requests and ridiculous time lines. “There’s not enough information” “They can’t tell me what information they need” – the list goes on. The reality is, neither side is to blame, often there’s multiple middlemen between the people with the request and the people whose job it is to fufil it.

Communicate & Facilitate Change

At the end of the day this is all an exercise in communication. You need to crash a car or two so you can demonstrate that you’ve followed the path and something isn’t working long it and it builds credibility with all involved. The most important thing is to avoid blame, note the wording of “look what happened to my car” versus “look what your boulder did to my car” . The obstacle owners aren’t mischievous punks who put a big rock out to see what happens – they may not even be aware it’s there or that something they’re doing makes it bigger than it needs to be. Everyone is trying to do their own job to the best of the ability but they may have goals or expectations that challenge the others. This process is about helping create awareness about what each participant needs and helping create an environment where those needs are fulfilled.

Sometimes awareness is all that’s needed, other times the solution is more complex but if we don’t follow the path we’ll never gain those insights.

Photos: Car Wreck - OpenSkyMedia | Jungle Path - chrissuderman

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I suppose I always knew this in the back of my head but learned it first hand this week while facilitating a 3-day long ‘think tank’ workshop at the bank I work at. As part of the process team I had helped design a self-facilitated process that teams would guide themselves through over the course of the day.

It was fairly standard vision-creation fare; ‘What’s our vision? What’s Stopping Us from getting There? How does our business model need to change? What do We Do First?” and exercises to help them think about do the thinking to answer those questions. To help them out we also had a team of roving facilitators (myself and the crew from The Moment) who would check on them periodically and either help them through parts they didn’t understand, or in the case of the teams who might be storming through, make sure they’re really working on expanding their thinking and not just trying to ‘Slam Dunk’ the idea.

A Room Full of Leaders
We expected there might be the odd challenge for teams as these were all high-performing individuals, each a leader (or potential leader) in their own respect – it didn’t take long for my first interesting scenario to pop-up.

I immediately knew one team was in for an interesting ride when I walked into their room 5 minutes into the morning and one team member (let’s call him ‘Bob’) was already laying out their ‘idea’ to them. My presence in the room received looks from other members of the team that clearly conveyed “help!” – their guide packages hadn’t even been opened yet. A quick pep-talk on trusting the process and the thinking that they needed to do before jumping to the ideas seemed to get them back on track and I wandered off to check on my other teams. However, when I returned a little while later I noticed that Bob was up once again, marker in hand and in control of the conversation.

The Invisible Hand
Now, when I do these types of sessions I try to insert myself into the team’s discussion as little as possible – I always picture those cars at amusement parks – the ones where you can steer a bit but there’s a rail to prevent you from getting too far off course. My job is to be that rail – if you’re steering nicely then most of the time you won’t even notice it’s there a little rub here and there to help make the corner but the passengers are probably completely unaware it’s happening – sometimes it takes a slightly rougher bounce to reinforce the path. The latter should be a rarity though if your process is designed right.

As a result, most of my time is spent listening to the teams trying to get a sense of how they’ve advanced since I last saw them as well as feeling out how ‘healthy’ the dialog is. Is everyone engaged & contributing? Has anyone checked out? What’s the body language in the room?

In the case of this room, Bob was the only one standing. The rest of the team were in their chairs. A couple of the team members looked to be on the verge of checking out, a few were actively listening and two were actively contributing to the dialog. Nothing surprising until I realized almost nothing was getting captured unless Bob either came up with the idea, or the idea supported his theory. The team wasn’t consciously aware of it but you could certainly see how it was playing out in the body language. As I scanned the room though, something clicked for me – I couldn’t see any other markers. There was only one visible, and it was firmly in Bob’s hand – the team hadn’t realized it but they had unwittingly granted him a dictatorship over their process.

Restoring Democracy
So how to restore democracy? Bob was a good guy and I don’t think he even realized what he was doing – I know when I’m capturing stuff in sessions there’s time where my mind really doesn’t want to add some other idea to the board but as a facilitator I’m conscious and aware of those types of thoughts/actions when I’m in the room. Had I stopped him and asked he probably would have told me he’d captured all the ideas that the team had come up with. I also risked alienating him and/or causing him to checkout from the process if I called him out on it in front of the team.

Instead I didn’t do anything, I left the room and asked the facility staff for some more markers. When I came back I placed them on the table (in front of the two who were actively trying to get in on the conversation) and simply said “I noticed your room didn’t get enough markers” then walked out. Ten minutes later I peeked in the window and there were a couple of people up at the boards, people were leaning forward in their chairs and the dialog was rolling along again. They never knew what happened, no one felt their car rub the rail.

Letting Other Ideas Bloom
I also made a mental note to come back to these guys at a critical moment in the conversation where they would flesh out their future vision. Time was tight and I didn’t want to chance them getting stuck in a similar cycle again if Bob really tried to drive his idea home.  It was a part of the process that had been deliberately left open, in that there were no instructions other than “You’ve got an hour, and this is what you need to have by the end of it” – the roving facilitators all knew to visit their teams early in this step and help the teams get off to the right start. So with this team I suggested they break into two groups and do some brainstorming & bodystorming to get some ideas, then regroup and discuss later in the hour.

I didn’t want to squash Bob’s idea but it’s important to ensure other ideas have the opportunity to grow and the team has a crop of ideas to choose from. By splitting the team I ensured that even if Bob convinced half of the team his idea was the way to go other ideas would have the chance to bloom with the other group.

In the end, the team came up with their own idea that incorporated bits and pieces of their individual ideas (including Bob’s) and I think they came up with an interesting concept. This was another case where the team didn’t realize what was happening but they had gently been guided around another corner.

All-in-all if you asked this team how much facilitating I actually did they’d probably say not much, that’d I’d just answered some questions for them and helpfully got them some markers.

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Photo Credits: Marker Tray – massdistraction | Guy at Whiteboard – Bill Keaggy | Markers - Tim Green aka atoach

Sidenote: The guy at the Whiteboard is not Bob but a guy named Dave. Dave’s pretty much the anti-Bob

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